HDR Photography
With the passing of the Solstice, my sabbatical in Berkeley is coming to an end. My softly nostalgia-tinted reminiscences of the Bay Area are now doubly-glazed: the refried beans, twice-baked potatoes, or biscotti of memory. All three options sound delicious.
As promised, images from the Corinthian Yacht Club’s Friday Night Race. I’m told that the boat in the lead is particularly valuable enough that it should be in the lead.
The light changed over the course of the evening, lending the setting a different feel that matched the coastline west of the center of San Francisco.
Commencement ceremonies have ended and the campus is quieting down to a mostly graduate-student-based buzz. The Campanile stands tall and mostly quiet—except, of course, for when the bells are ringing.
Coit Tower, on its leafy green (i.e. unlit at night) hillside, makes for an odd break in the structure of the more northerly parts of San Francisco. I particularly like this short of the juxtaposition of the Tower’s aesthetic beauty with the utilitarian structures of Treasure Island in the foreground.
Monster-smash rain storms the night before left me surprised when this Sunday morning broad blue skies and linear sunlight to reflect from every surface in Berkeley. The Campanile (a.k.a. Sather Tower) was looking particularly proud of itself.
Decaseconds turns five years old just about this week, and today I’m turning 30. “Now” is a good time to think about age and the passage of time, I suppose, but I’d rather focus on something else: achievement. We’ve gotten a lot done in the past years—and there’s a lot more to come. Looking back on my early photographs on places like Berkeley’s Campanile, I can see all of the steps that led me to now. On to the next year!
As with my photograph of the Seattle Public Library, I’m exposing my inner hipster with these images. Double exposures had an element of serendipity and excitement when they originated from film cameras. I guess I’d call these more studies or experiments in how to bring together the landscape images I’ve enjoyed creating with the portraits I find myself taking for practical purposes: LinkedIn, passports, school webpages, etc.
With these imagines, in particular, I’ve played with the idea of “stacking” the face and the main subject of the other image (be it lighthouse or galaxy NGC1275 overlay data from the Hubble Telescope).
Nearly every surface in this image is brick. From the alleyway to the retaining walls to the towers: brick, brick, brick (or pavers). I understand sheathing a structural steel building in glass or densglass or (heaven forbid) “exterior insulation finishing system,” a.k.a. Dryvit, but the kind of person-hours necessary to assemble all of that orderly brick is mind-boggling.
Beyond Sather Tower’s bars and columns is Telegraph Ave. and the city of Oakland. I never forget that view, but I do somehow always forget the red tiles at the top of the campanile. I guess my brain abstracts away the details, even when they’re a major part of the scene.
Sunlight of late summer maneuvers through the Seattle skyline, and I can’t help but enjoy the way reflections and the impossible geometry (one of my favorite clichés) of Rainier Tower’s slender base stand out among the more “traditional” shapes of the surroundings buildings.
The longer I spend in small-town life, the more alien a view down the tree-lined streets of Seattle becomes. If the warm towers are a rare sight, the man crossing the street with his dog is a more normal image for me to concentrate on.
At the moment the sunset sets behind the hills, the sky above San Francisco is still gold, but the massive structures and high-tech vehicles of the city below are activating their illumination machines and preparing for night beneath the marine layer. If the Bay Area is a loose solar system of different worlds, San Francisco must be its cyberpunk crown jewel.
Portland’s Pearl District is colonized by construction like some sort of reverse-termites; shiny new buildings add to the skyline each day. As impressive as the reflections and the bridges and the gorgeous dawn sky is, I rather love the image of the man reading the paper in the bottom-right corner of the image. He’s literally on the edge of this dramatic image, but so thoroughly unfazed. Reading the paper and eating cereal has to happen sometime!
My co-author is the true Seattleite, and I began to understand the appeal of the place when I spent time there for a wedding this weekend. From atop the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, the view of uncanny Rainier Tower complements the wee cars in the streets below. Dawn is the time to gaze down the canyons.
Fire trails seem like a friendly, common, down-to-earth feature of many California hillsides. There’s a strange context alongside the blazing sky and the busy city in the distance. When I look farther off and see the Golden Gate Bridge and Angel Island, the juxtaposition feels only more emphasized.
But perhaps I like that vision. We build things both grand and humble.
Decaseconds 